Spin-exchange collisions in quantum degenerate gases act as a nonlinear interaction that creates entanglement between atoms in different spin states. Therefore, they make it possible to study matter-wave quantum nonlinear optics in spin space. In my work towards creating a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium to study these collisions, I made improvements to a laser cooling and trapping apparatus that are detailed in this thesis. I implemented and tested an imaging system for absorption and fluorescence imaging. I used this imaging system to optimize a laser cooling and trapping apparatus to yield trapped atom numbers of 6.3 x 108 and sub-Doppler temperatures of 65.0(1) μK. These numbers and temperatures provide a good starting point for further cooling via forced evaporation in a crossed optical dipole trap and will allow the group to reach Bose-Einstein condensate temperatures of ~ 100 nK in near future.